• The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.
• Ronald Read was patient; Richard Fuscone was greedy. That’s all it took to eclipse the massive education and experience gap between the two.
• Two topics impact everyone, whether you are interested in them or not: health and money.
• “History never repeats itself; man always does.”
• what you’ve experienced is more compelling than what you learn second-hand.
• no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.
• Studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior.
• “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.”
• “Our findings suggest that individual investors’ willingness to bear risk depends on personal history.”
• That kind of thing doesn’t just affect the opportunities you come across; it affects what you think about those opportunities when they’re presented to you.
• For a topic that is so influenced by emotion versus fact, this is a problem. And it helps explain why we don’t always do what we’re supposed to with money. We all do crazy stuff with money, because we’re all relatively new to this game and what looks crazy to you might make sense to me. But no one is crazy—we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.
• “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”
• Bill Dougall was a World War II navy pilot turned high school math and science teacher. “He believed that book study wasn’t enough without real-world experience. He also realized that we’d need to know something about computers when we got to college,” recalled late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
• If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.
• no one actually thinks luck doesn’t play a role in financial success. But since it’s hard to quantify luck and rude to suggest people’s success is owed to it, the default stance is often to implicitly ignore luck as a factor of success.
• quality of your education and the doors that open for you are heavily linked to your parents’ socioeconomic status.
• The line between bold and reckless can be thin. When we don’t give risk and luck their proper billing it’s often invisible.
• Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.
• Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
• Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to study extreme examples—the billionaires, the CEOs, or the massive failures that dominate the news—and extreme examples are often the least applicable to other situations, given their complexity.